Thy Dark Streets Shineth
by embroiderama
Summary: Six months after Dean’s deal at the crossroads, he and Sam take a moment to breathe between hunts.


Title: Thy Dark Streets Shineth

Author: embroiderama

Characters: Sam, Dean (gen)

Rating: PG-13

Warnings: none

Spoilers: AHBL2

Word Count: 1,050

Disclaimer: None of the Winchesters belong to me, alas.

Summary: Six months after Dean's deal at the crossroads, he and Sam take a moment to breathe between hunts.

Notes: Written for spn50states - Pennsylvania. This is set in the town where I grew up, but I don't hate the place as much as Dean does. Beta'd by inniedarling, but I've made some changes since then so she's not to blame.

Dean stared up at the big, bright asterisk shape some idiots had stuck into the top of the rounded, worn-down hill the locals called South Mountain. Like he was supposed to believe that a bunch of light bulbs on a frame was some kind of magical star up in the sky, shining holy goodness down on the town below, instead of a waste of freakin' electricity. There was no such thing as a miracle, nobody coming to save them, and some hill-top bauble wasn't about to convince Dean otherwise.

The evening was cool, but the hood of the Impala had absorbed some of the heat of the day and was sharing it with him, radiating it up through his jeans into his skin. Dean took a long pull on his beer and then set it back down against the windshield between his hip and Sam's.

"Fucking expensive beer, Sammy."

Sam didn't answer, just breathed beside Dean in the semi-dark of the motel parking lot.

"I hate this fucking state. What kind of place doesn't let you buy beer at the 7-11? Makes you go to a bar and pay ten bucks for a six-pack of fucking PBR?" Dean took a swallow, grimaced. "Not my kind of place."

Dean looked away from the fake star up on the hill, but there was something bright staring back at him from every direction he turned. Little Christmas trees with colored lights on them tied to the traffic light poles. Garlands of lights along the sides of the bridge that ran by their motel. Full-on Christmas, and it was only November.

Dean had never liked the way people hurried up the year, pushed up all the holidays until you could buy Valentine's Day candy on Christmas Eve, but this year-- this year it felt personal. Everything about this damn town rubbed him the wrong way.

Sam drank down the rest of his beer and swallowed hard. "How many ghosts do you think are down there?"

If Dean turned all the way around he could see the one dark gap in the sea of Christmas lights, street lights, and house lights. The rusting remains of the old steel factory still loomed over this part of town, but more was torn down every day to make way for new development. A century or two of men and women working there, dying there. The EMF meter had jumped and danced, squealing its signal into the earpiece until Dean yanked it out and let it dangle over his shoulder.

He could feel it in the air down around the destruction site--the place was rotten, full-up with the remnants of violent deaths, lives ended with pain and anger and a craving for retribution.

"You remember that apartment we had in Ohio?" Sam's voice sounded strained in a way that Dean was getting tired of hearing. He didn't know if he'd ever get to hear it any other way again.

"When you were twelve? Yeah."

"With the water bugs."

Christ, the water bugs. They'd lived on the third floor for two months without any bug problems, despite how old the little apartment building was. Then somebody decided to fix up the bathroom on the ground floor, tearing up walls that had been rotted out by decades of water leaks and humidity, in the process disturbing water bugs that must have lived in those walls since time out of mind. Dean had crushed a dozen or more of the smaller ones--silver-dollar sized bodies with legs sticking out all around making a thick, wet crunch under his boots.

There was one, body the size of the ring left by a coffee cup, that he smashed with his geometry book. The biggest, with its body larger than the palm of Dean's hand, had died pinned to the wall by a bolt from the crossbow. Dean had been tempted to leave it there as proof for Dad that Sammy was keeping up with his training, but in the end it was just too disgusting, and it ended up in the trash with what must have been its great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren.

"Yeah." Dean nodded, taking another sip of his beer. He knew exactly what Sam meant. This place was just like that--old and rotted, with the nasty shit contained until somebody decided to tear down the walls in the name of progress. He didn't think they could take care of this problem with boot heels and books, but they'd work it out one way or another.

They couldn't dig up so many graves in a city so small, but the south side of the city was dotted with a couple dozen Catholic churches. Enough holy water, maybe, to clean the place up, scrub it up so that the casinos and the stores and the little chain restaurants could go up without any more workmen finding themselves crushed by equipment or burned by metal suddenly gone liquid.

The thought of making the site safe for craps tables and easy money and waitresses in short skirts might have cheered Dean up, but he knew that construction would take more than six months.

Six months from today, he'd be gone.

Dean knew they should be out hunting already, jumping the gates into the graveyard of the industrial hell where too many men became vengeful spirits, but he just didn't have the heart for it. Sam's heavy silence pressed in on him, and he knew his brother felt the same. They'd been running hard for six months, tracking down the demons released back in Wyoming and taking on other jobs as they found them.

But they weren't any closer to a way out of the bargain Dean had made, and every day was a day closer to the darkness. They were halfway through the year now, and just for this one night neither of them could pretend that the sky wasn't just a little dimmer every morning.

Dean leaned over to fish another over-priced beer out of the bag he'd set next to the front tire and then leaned back against the windshield. When he closed his eyes, he could hear cars driving by and Sam's quiet breathing, and he could still see that damned star, glowing white and small behind his eyelids.


End file.
